A review by jayisreading
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination by Toni Morrison

challenging informative reflective medium-paced

5.0

In less than one hundred pages, Toni Morrison presented a sharp exploration of race in American literature, specifically the “Africanist presence” in these novels. I am oversimplifying the nuances of her argument here, but, in essence, Morrison argued that the construct of whiteness depended on and responded to the imagining of Blackness. Furthermore, in a society as racialized as the one in the United States, Morrison argued that it would be practically impossible to avoid the influences of race in this nation’s literature, whether one is cognizant of these influences or not. I think the following quote does a great job encapsulating what she was getting at:

The world does not become raceless or will not become unracialized by assertion. The act of enforcing racelessness in literary discourse is itself a racial act. Pouring rhetorical acid on the fingers of a black hand may indeed destroy the prints, but not the hand. Besides, what happens in that violent, self-serving act of erasure to the hands, the fingers, the fingerprints of the one who does the pouring? Do they remain acid-free? The literature itself suggests otherwise.

Morrison supplemented her insightful critiques with close readings of various novels, many of them being from the so-called American literary canon. She reframed these white works through a Black lens to demonstrate how Black people (and, more broadly, nonwhite people) have been poorly characterized or, more frequently, entirely shut out from these stories, in spite of the undercurrents of race being ever-present.

Much of Morrison’s explorations complemented academic discourses happening around power dynamics and the construct of the “Other” (i.e., poststructuralism) at the time of this book’s publication, and it certainly helps to have some familiarity with these theoretical framings to further understand the points she wanted to make. Considering this, it wouldn’t surprise me if some people find this book denser than they’d like, but I find that her writing is far more approachable than the theorists who explored similar themes. This is all to say that I really do think it’s worth picking this book up, even if it is a challenge. I do think reading Playing in the Dark some thirty years later makes some of Morrison’s ideas seem “obvious,” but I think there’s still a lot to get out of her thinking and can serve as a good reminder to critically engage with American literature with her points in mind.
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